REVIEWS 705

DAL YONG JIN:

New Korean Wave: Transnational Cultural Power in the Age of Social
Media.
232 pp. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016. ISBN
978 0 252 03997.
doi:10.1017/S0041977X16000720

The available literature on the contemporary phenomenon of Korean Wave is rap-

idly growing although, and as Jin rightly points out, most of it consists either of col-
lections of essays developed from conferences or of monographs that explore a
single element of cultural production. I suspect there is a good reason for this,
since few commentators have sufficient expertise to write a comprehensive account
of each and every cultural category – films, TV dramas, music, animations, digital
games, smartphones and social media apps, costumes, cuisine and plastic surgery.
Jin sets out to provide the whole picture, as a comprehensive and all-embracing
account, but in doing so he leaves out significant discussions of the last three. He
also attempts to get away from an approach built from a single academic discipline
such as anthropology, cultural studies or musicology/ethnomusicology, and, in
terms of the rich data he has mined, to a considerable degree he succeeds, although
his choice of hybridity as an overarching articulatory frame ultimately folds the
account back into cultural studies’ territory.
Jin laudably wants to be inclusive. He explores the socio-cultural contexts of
Korean Wave history, positioning interventions from the South Korean govern-
ment squarely within the story of success; “popular culture cannot be separated
from cultural policies” (p. 4). For those who see neoliberalism as shrinking the
role of government, the approach is unlikely to be welcome, but chapter 2,
“Cultural policies in the new Korean Wave era”, provides the defence, arguing
that intervention is necessitated by the relationship between the nation state and
the government’s responsibility for setting economic and trade policies. This
leads Jin to state the economic imperative of the Korean Wave: the cultural con-
tent it has nurtured, rather than other areas of manufacturing such as electronics,
cars, and ship building, has been responsible for generating Korea’s trade sur-
pluses in recent years. He notes that Korea is alone in the world in having suc-
ceeded with such a broad agenda for exporting cultural production, and sees
the high standards of training and pioneering technological prowess – witnessed,
not least, in social media and smartphone platforms – as providing the launch pad
for new modes of distribution and the generation of all-inclusive profit models.
He also attempts to demonstrate the possibility that Korean Wave develops
non-Western cultural hegemonies. This, though, has to be seen as something
still in process rather than as proven, but it suggests that an inclusive and thor-
ough analysis ought to offer the potential for new theoretical perspectives to
emerge on cultural flows, transnationalism, glocalization and mimesis. If so,
then it is surely true that adopting existing theories to explain the Korean case
will never be wholly satisfactory. However, Jin’s discussion of hybridity fails
to escape the trap: he starts with Robertson’s 1995 idea of glocalization, brings
in the standard perspectives of Appadurai, Tomlinson, Giddens and Bhabha,
then explores those such as Iwabuchi and Lu who have applied ideas of hybridity
to East Asian cultural production.
New Korean Wave clearly separates Korean Wave 1.0 – the period from the
late 1990s to around 2006, and for which decline set in by 2005 if not before –

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 706 REVIEWS

and Korean Wave 2.0. Korean Wave 2.0 gathered pace by 2008, aided by the
arrival of smartphones. Korean Wave 1.0 was about TV dramas, films and online
games; the government worked on technology and infrastructure but remained
largely hands-off when it came to cultural production, not least because of
local nationalism and the conservative morality; production was local, with the
East Asian region reached through distributors who recognized shared historical
experiences and shared social and behavioural norms. Korean Wave 2.0 targets
younger age groups and more global audiences, and involves a much more
hands-on approach from government. It focuses on K-Pop, gaming, animation
and social media. This volume is primarily concerned with Korean Wave 2.0,
although it drills down into the local context, taking us back to earlier decades
to see how, for example, the film industry emerged and then declined in the
1980s as restrictions on Hollywood imports were removed, or how the
pan-Asian ballads that dominated the local music scene in the 1980s were
replaced by idol groups trained by entertainment companies in the mid 1990s
and by strategies for displacement in other markets that began in the early
years of the new millennium as Korean stars such as BoA were marketed as
Japanese. To keep the book within a reasonable word count, the details offered
are compressed, and this leaves New Korean Wave as an overview text. There
is simply no space to give an exhaustive exploration of any single element of cul-
tural production, be it film or pop music. And, given the core observation that the
South Korean government has become closely involved in ensuring local busi-
ness and technology conditions are right and in fostering global promotion, we
should probably see the account as a snapshot that will soon be regarded as his-
torical: government think-tanks have spent the last couple of years planning
Korean Wave 3.0 . . .
In structure, New Korean Wave opens with two overview chapters, then offers
single chapters on television programmes – particularly dramas, but outlining
how the last decade has seen an increase in the import and export of formats
such as game shows – and on cinema, where Jin accepts that the promise of the
early 2000s never fully materialized. The next chapter, on animation, goes a long
way to balance accounts of the better-known Japanese and Chinese industries. A
chapter on K-Pop vacillates between celebration and the belief that music production
is becoming too uniform, with stars who lack personality; the proffered explanation,
that mimicking the West to allow Korean Wave exports doesn’t allow for the inclu-
sion of any Korean cultural DNA, although common in other publications, seems a
little vacuous. The next chapter, on gaming, is more convincing, and demonstrates
how the spread of local social institutions such as PC-bangs set up networked com-
munities who could capitalize on the arrival of social networking platforms. The
final chapter on smartphones and the development of apps for them neatly encapsu-
lates why technological advances and the ability to reach mass audiences cheaply
has ensured the success of the Korean Wave.
Right now, we have plenty of reasons to celebrate the Korean Wave, but there
may be clouds on the horizon, since, as JIn notes in his conclusion, transnationalism
demands locally driven hybrids that fail to accommodate local forms, but the still
small local Korean cultural content providers, by necessity, always have to challenge
the dominance of multinational corporations while staying anchored to Korea and
the local. Success, then, may prove short-lived.

Keith Howard
SOAS University of London

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